In 1977 Fujitsu produced the first supercomputer prototype called
the F230-75 APU that was a pipelined vector processor added to a
scalar processor. This attached processor was installed in the Japanese
Atomic Energy Commission (JAERI) and the National Aerospace Lab
(NAL).
In 1983 the company came out with the VP-200 and VP-100
systems, which later spun off the low-end VP-50 and VP-30 systems.
In 1986 came the VP-400 (with twice as many pipelines as the VP-
200) and as of mid-1987 the whole family became the E-series with
the addition of an extra (multiply-add) pipelined floating point unit
that boosted the performance potential by 50%. Thanks to the flexible
range of systems in this generation (VP-30E to VP-400E), and other
reasons such as good marketing and a broad range of applications,
Fujitsu became the largest domestic supplier with over 80 systems
installed, many of which are now well below the cut-off limit in the
TOP500 list.

Available since 1990, the VP-2000 family can offer a peak
performance of 5 Gflop/s thanks to a vector cycle time of 3.2 ns. The
family was initially announced with four vector performance levels
(model 2100, 2200, 2400, and 2600) where each level could have
either one of two scalar processors. but the VP-2400/40 doubled this
limit offering a peak vector performance similar to the VP-2600. Only
the top range of these models are now represented in the Japanese
TOP500 list.
Previous machines had been heavily criticised for the lack of
memory throughput. The VP-400 series had only one load/store path
to memory that peaked at 4.57 GB/s. This was improved in the VP-2000 series by doubling the paths so that each pipeline set can do two
load/store operations per cycle giving a total transfer rate of 20 GB/s.